Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday September 13, 2017 @04:30PM
from the jump-ship dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On October 5, 2015, facing mounting criticism about the hate groups proliferating on Reddit, the site banned a slew of offensive subreddits, including r/Coontown and r/fatpeoplehate, which targeted Black people and those with weight issues. But did banning these online groups from Reddit diminish hateful behavior overall, or did the hate just spread to other places? A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, and University of Michigan examines just that, and uses data collected from 100 million Reddit posts that were created before and after the aforementioned subreddits were dissolved. Published in the journal ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, the researchers conclude that the 2015 ban worked. More accounts than expected discontinued their use on the site, and accounts that stayed after the ban drastically reduced their hate speech. However, studies like this raise questions about the systemic issues facing the internet at large, and how our culture should deal with online hate speech. First, the researchers automatically extracted words from the banned subreddits to create a dataset that included hate speech and community-specific lingo. The researchers looked at the accounts of users who were active on those subreddits and compared their posting activity from before and after those offensive subreddits were banned. The team was able to monitor upticks or drops in the hate speech across Reddit and if that speech had "migrated" to other subreddits as a result.

Coontown was banned because of the speech it contained, not because of what our users did. Reddit's CEOs Steve Huffman and Ellen Pao both admitted this.

The Board of Directors pushed for the banning, spez complied.

Reddit is a left-wing propaganda mill, they hire employees specifically to promote social justice (this has been admitted too!), and they also banned my subreddit/r/alternativeright simply because they didn't want to give/r/altright 's userbase to me. My sub didn't have any doxing info on it.

A lot of us have moved to Mastodon [joinmastodon.org], which is like Twitter but federated like email. You can host your own Mastodon instance (server) and set your own local policies. Then your users can talk to users on my instance, just like Outlook users can email people at Gmail.

But! I can set my own policies, too. If your users are causing problems for mine, I can completely disconnect from you and end the problem from my side. This is an excellent situation. Instances that are too tolerant of trolls find themselves disconnected from the network. Instances that are too thin-skinned and that server connections too quickly end up the same. Either way, their more mainstream users are likely to flee to more moderately administered instances, so there's a nice feedback loop that optimizes for common decency above other extremes.

Can I interest you in a cup of public-reputation-based proactive filtering? Wouldn't you rather spend your time with nice people, perhaps with a tilt in favor of people who have even better reputations than your own?

Maybe... The problem with reputation based systems is that they are wide open to trolling as well. Slashdot almost works, but periodically people going against the groupthink or getting mod-bombed have their karma destroyed.

Sounds like a bit of a request for more information and a suggestion about the direction of the information you seek?

I think that by making the reputation-source-data available (via links on the analysis page), you can prevent the trolls from gaming the system. You would be able to apply various algorithms to detect trolls and even networks of sock puppets, basically by using the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon approach. Legitimate people would eventually link to legitimate people you actually know, while sock pup

Stack Exchange uses a reputation system like the one you describe. They try to detect unwanted behaviour, but it's still extremely hostile to new users and vulnerable to dog-piling.

The one thing they do have right is that down-votes carry a cost for the voter, but it's too small. At the moment it's only -1, and people are happy to take that hit to push their political agendas or harass users. Plus it's easy to create new accounts with a +100 rep bonus, giving them plenty of ammunition to down-vote people th

I think that much of your concern would be addressed with a "maturity filter", even though it is a relatively trivial aspect of the public reputation. A new identity is young, and I'm willing to wait a month or two for it to mature and develop a ripe reputation--at the expense of people who are more tolerant of newbies than I usually want to be.

Actually, I would prefer a mixed mode if it were possible. I'd be willing to see top-level comments from newbies, at least most of the time, but I don't want any per

One of the things that destroyed usenet was rampaging trolls. The kill-list was a weak response that ultimately availed naught. That is why I advocate for a more proactive reputation-based-filtering solution. You might choose to stuff your eyes and ears with tripe, but I would prefer not to.

There is a great deal of confusion about "freedom" and "free speech". Your freedom to speak freely should not block my freedom to ignore idiots. Not that I'm calling you an idiot. Yet. However, if I had to make a prediction based on your short comment...

Mate, that's a really sodding stupid comment. All you've done is ignore everything he wow and go work "you're so emotional!!111!1one".

Not wanting to have every thread infested with trolls is not the same as being ruled by emotions. Sometimes, most times actually, grown-ups want to have grown up conversations that aren't interspersed with pejoratives about black people, neo Nazi rhetoric and so on and so forth.

Not sure who he ["Mate"] was, but it seemed to be a bit of extraneous and rather dull-witted trollage that, as I mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, ought to be rendered invisible by the troll himself. I don't care about the public masturbation of the trolls. I simply prefer not to see it, and I speculate that many other people would agree if that were a feature of any discussion board. (The civility-promotion system of the Denver Post sounds like an interesting step in the right direction.)

I appear to have you marked as a friend which means I must often see value in your posts. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt for now and simply recommend that you step away form the keyboard for a while.

Your plan only works as long as the signal-to-noise ratio is low enough that you can FIND the posts worth reading/replying to among the trolls.

Without some kind of filter, sooner or later, the adult conversations are simply drowned out by the shitposters. And the more that happens, the more the adults simply don't bother showing up because finding a good conversation now takes more effort than adults have time or energy to provide.

There has to be compromise. I agree with you so long as everyone has the ability to start their own site and not worry about being shut down by a few select over powered companies. (assuming only legal content)

Right now, you forfeit your ability to have a site if you say the wrong thing that a few companies may not like as stormfags showed us. Nobody owes you a phone line or access to a road didn't work why would it work now?

I never said they were, only implied that they should do so, especially if they want to encourage lively discussion. I also think it's interesting that the side they've chosen has a history of bitching just as loudly (if not more) when they are denied the 'soapbox' due to organizational limits or laws.

If restricting the use of their product by people operating under the name 'coontown' as a platform for racist abuse amounts to choosing a 'side' then fuck it, I'm on that 'side'' too. What the Hell's wrong with you?

Surely if they want to encourage lively discussion they should ban the people who try to sabotage it with fat shaming and extreme racism.

Trolls aren't trying to improve the quality of discussion. They aren't trying to put forward unpopular opinions (you can do that without calling someone a n!gger). They are trying to sabotage the debate, to drive people away or silence them.

You know how your parents eventually taught you not to shit all over the house? It is essentially the same thing. My cousin works in a day care and has the unfortunate job of doing this kind of training when the (wealthy, in theory well educated) parents fail to do so.

I suspect this will be much the same but much older children will have to be educated.

A company operating a site without government funding should be the one to define who the trolls are on their site. Simple as that.

The First Amendment is immensely important and must be defended, even when doing so means defending abhorrent people, but we need to get over this false sense of entitlement that suggests organizations have no right to interfere with, discourage, or otherwise supervise the use of the platforms they've built. As the creators of those sites, that's their prerogative. The Constitut

I'm going to pretend that was a sincere question instead of another bit of first-post drivel.

Each person should be free to define what to regard as a waste of time. Given that freedom, I would certain define trolls as worthless wasters of my precious time. Sometimes a troll can be thought-provoking, but it's only accidental, and I'd much prefer to spend my limited time with nice people, which leads to my suggestion:

You need to stop and think about what free speech actually means. Your beloved First Amendment, that only applies to the government curtailing your speech. It sure as hell doesn't apply to something like Reddit, nor does it shield you from the responses of other people.

Correct, yet a strawman. I never said the first amendment applies here. Stop pretending you don't understand the difference between arguing what should be vs arguing what is. It's the socjus crowd demanding that institutions (eg reddit) give them their gilded safe spaces, at taxpayer expense no less. They've demonstrated they've got no problem infiltrating such organizations to get what they want at everyone else's financial and political expense.

For all practical purposes, Reddit is private property. They can decide what they are willing to tolerate, and what they're not. As I said, they don't owe you a platform.

So if some site decided to toss all them "pinko commis" off their site for expressing left wing views, you'd be ok with that?

Yes, of course!

I'm not the OP, but this has already happened multiple times. Gab and PewTube both regularly ban left leaning users and channels. One of PewTube's most popular videos was about communism, until they deleted it.

And that's fine. That's how it should be. If videos about communism trigger the poor snowflakes, they are welcome to build a safe space for themselves.

Let me ask you a question. Would you be okay if I came and set up my soap box in your living room? Ideally right in front of the TV. Com

> You need to stop and think about what free speech actually means. Your beloved First Amendment, that only applies to the government curtailing your speech.

It's a principle that is valued as the cornerstone of democracy.

You are attempting to use a "legalistic" argument to pretty much completely ignore a principle. You want to pretend that free speech is only defined by a single bit of law. You are eager to demonstrate WHY that law exists.

If not for that law, people JUST LIKE YOU would use the government to do bad things.

The Bill of Rights is not a comprehensive list of human rights. It's merely a set of limits placed on the federal government.

TL;DR "The 'right' to 'Free speech' is a toothless legalism. Actual freedom of speech is a privilege of the financialist ruling class, their sycophants, and loyal nomenklatura. I've got mine so screw you Jack."

> Oppressors and the oppressed are not morally interchangeable. It's amazing that there are still people that don't get that.

We don't get it because it's WRONG. You are trying to claim that moral rules obey identity politics. That's pretty much the opposite of what liberalism is supposed to believe in. All rules apply to everyone equally.

You don't get a free pass or an automatic death sentence just because of a label someone can hang on you.

When he appeared a few months back, he was just your typical idiot poster getting called out on stupid shit. Then I saw a bunch of posts attacking him on a personal level, for no reason. I actually defended him on one occasion, saying the attacks were unnecessary/irrelevant to his shitty posts. Then I saw all the Amazon Affiliate link spam, and the increased harassment got to the point that my guess is he was doing it himself sometimes.

He's been around longer than that, at least a year. I thought the trolling started because he had some odd stories that he repeated a little too often, including lots of mentions of his weight and being under-employed. Odd, but nothing too obnoxious. I didn't notice the affiliate links until after the serious trolling started, and while I haven't combed his history, it seemed like he only started doing that to taunt them back. The trolling is way over the top, but his response with the links is definitely j

First, the researchers automatically extracted words from the banned subreddits to create a dataset that included hate speech and community-specific lingo. The researchers looked at the accounts of users who were active on those subreddits and compared their posting activity from before and after those offensive subreddits were banned. The team was able to monitor upticks or drops in the hate speech across Reddit and if that speech had "migrated" to other subreddits as a result.

How do they know if the person using the "N" word is black, in which case it's considered OK, or non-black, in which case it's an obvious crime against all humanity? Or calling someone a fag is OK for Milo but wrong for normal people? Granted certain sub-forums are likely largely one demographic but word based still seems flawed.

But in a sub does overt anything mean much? You aren't likely to stumble across niche subs like that by accident. Hell, I still find useful normal subs I didn't know existed because finding subs by topic isn't all that easy on reddit, especially if the title and description don't contain the right key words.

/r/fatpeoplehate has 150,000 subscribers. The study is really interesting - they didn't have to ban any specific users, just those subreddits, and the main fat haters moved to Voat and the rest of the community stopped being such asshats.

This is a well understood principal in sociology. A small number of people behaving like asshats gives others "permission" to do the same. It normalizes it.

I think you overstate "normalizing" when describing a subreddit subscription as "normalizing" as well as confusing cause and effect of fat hating. I'd wager the majority of those subscribers didn't visit the sub regularly and none of them had positive or neutral views of fat people -- they didn't become fat haters because they saw the sub.

If Reddit was comprised of some small number of subreddits, I could see where this would be a problem but the quantity of subs and their isolation makes this seem like mu

If there is no causal link between the existence a fat-hating subreddit and poor behaviour, why was banning it so successful? The study says that users who were part of that subreddit and used a great deal of abusive/foul language actually changed their behaviour afterwards, being nicer on other parts of the site.

The idea is every time you post a comment you are required to rate several other comments as either "Civil" or "Not Civil", but if you are "wrong" too many times you might get banned. That is, if you rate a comment as "Civil" when enough other

Here is another good point from a 2005 munich university study - hate speech wasn't a topic back then, only flaming:

allowing flaming on a respectable website will1. drag down this websites standards in all aspects2. make flaming more widely accepted especially on this website but also outside3. drives out old customers objecting flaming4. brings in new customers prefering flaming

All of this is pretty obvious but you will be surprised how little the editorial staff is aware of this.

Fat People Hate was a terrible place, without a doubt, but they stayed in their little box and didn't attempt to invade other subreddits. They moved to Voat, which has also become an awful place, but they maintained their standards of behavior -- being dicks to people who don't really deserve it (and a few who do), but not trying to stir up shit in other groups. Since what they did was deliberately steered away from abuse of the network, I felt they had every right to continue. Of course, advertisers call t

Actually, this may be a stretch, but I believe that the 2015 reddit crackdown on "hate subs" not only didn't have the intended effect, it contributed a LOT to Donald Trump's election./r/the_donald arose when all of the people who had their communities destroyed had nowhere else to go, and attracted a lot of other people who would never post to/r/coontown or even read it, but were outraged that reddit decided they didn't get to exist any more. I don't agree with any of those subs, but I'm far more disgust

What are you on about? We have 9, and we play the superior 3 down CFL rules. Sad American teams need that 4th down as a crutch.

> You'll be overrun by "refugees" soon enoughHysterical xenophobes have been saying that for decades and yet here we are.

> If it wasn't for the Brits, you would have lost the war of 1812 to the American freedom fighters.Uh, in 1812 we WERE Brits. So your argument is if it wasn't for us, we would have lost? Sure. I guess that's true

As I'm sure you're aware, he's making an argument, not interpreting the law. Free expression does diffuse the need for physical violence. It doesn't matter whether the censor is the state or private. Shut down communication (especially the uncomfortable kind) long enough and the conflict will escalate.

Researchers answered the question of "did the hate just spread to other places" by checking only the place that banned it...

I caught that as well.

Unimaginably bad conclusion they drew given the data. Almost as if instead of scientists that they are lowly sociologists, a professions where getting away with pretending that its science is its only redeeming quality.

Shame neither of you actually read TFA. They did actually look on other sites, particularly Voat since that's where people said they would go, and found a lot of identical usernames with similar use of racist language on similarly names sub-boards.

That's why they concluded that the ban worked for Reddit, and pushed the people affected to Voat which is, as you might expect, a complete cess-pit.

Why do you oppose the rights of Silicon Valley organizations to not host content they find offensive? (As if it makes sense to talk about "Silicon Valley" as a monolithic entity, like Tinder and Tumblr are likely to have similar codes of ethics.)

You realize, of course, that those aren't related in any way. There are many reasons [eeoc.gov] you can't discriminate against someone, but many more reasons why you can. I can refuse to serve you because I don't like the shirt you're wearing or your cologne or your haircut (as long as those aren't proxies for your race, sex, or national origin).

But more importantly, there's an enormous legal gap between who you are and what you've done. It's not OK to kick you out of my restaurant because you're white. It's way OK to

Free speech is an idea that came out of the age of enlightenment and the general gist is that we should let people have their say rather than censoring them because that just bottles up their anger and pisses them off even more.

Turns out, we're debating this in an article about a study that concludes otherwise.

Expressing thought and emotion is one of those basics rights

To be clear, you have the absolute right to express yourself. You have no right to express yourself in my living room after I've told you to leave.

I don't know. While I had the same thoughts as you at the start of the post (just because they're no longer on Reddit, it doesn't mean they no longer exist) your subsequent claim--that they definitely all moved elsewhere and are doing the exact same things they used to--is also unwarranted. I'd say there's at least a chance for other alternatives, including 1) deciding maybe it's not that cool and stopping, 2) shrugging it off and giving up, 3) wanting to move on but not finding another community and then e